Landpooling - creating visions and implementing plans

We all have heard the statistics about growth and the amount of construction that will take place over the coming decades. Greenfield development will continue to dominant the marketplace. We need new tools to manage this growth.

Picture this: A group of landowners in your county comes to you. They have assembled concensus to unify planning for conservation and development of their parcels. Using ecological-based planning and market data, they have determined that their parcels should all be planned and developed as a single unit. Their thinking is that they can protect natural resources better and make more money by avoiding peicemeal development. Depending on where you are in the country, they may have assembled a few hundred acres or tens of thousands; size is determined by place-specific economic and ecological analysis.

Working with appropriate conservation organizations, they have decided they will permenantly protect resources that cross multiple parcels and would like to form a business to work with you to manage development in the remaining areas.

What do you do? Will you work with them? Or would you rather tell them the existing comprehensive plan is sacrosanct and deal with each of them as the pursue their own interests?

I ask because I believe there is a better way to manage growth in greenfield areas and I want your input. Thanks.

After reading initial responses, I'd like to add one more question. What would you do to encourage this kind of activity? What Kennecott is doing is great, but it's a single landholding. PUD's are excellent tools as well, but has anyone ever seen one over 10,000 or 30,000 acres? What I see is the next step beyond Chattahoochee Hill Country, where instead of simply creating a plan and designing zoning around it, property owners actually assign their development rights to a business that implements the plan.

We all have heard the statistics about growth and the amount of construction that will take place over the coming decades. Greenfield development will continue to dominant the marketplace. We need new tools to manage this growth.

Picture this: A group of landowners in your county comes to you. They have assembled concensus to unify planning for conservation and development of their parcels. Using ecological-based planning and market data, they have determined that their parcels should all be planned and developed as a single unit. Their thinking is that they can protect natural resources better and make more money by avoiding peicemeal development. Depending on where you are in the country, they may have assembled a few hundred acres or tens of thousands; size is determined by place-specific economic and ecological analysis.

Working with appropriate conservation organizations, they have decided they will permenantly protect resources that cross multiple parcels and would like to form a business to work with you to manage development in the remaining areas.

What do you do? Will you work with them? Or would you rather tell them the existing comprehensive plan is sacrosanct and deal with each of them as the pursue their own interests?

I ask because I believe there is a better way to manage growth in greenfield areas and I want your input. Thanks.

I'd absolutely work with them. I think there are a number of models for this type of thing around the Bay Area.

You work with them. Kenecott Land is doing this right now in SLC, on an incredibly large scale. They own over 100 square miles of land (most of it a mountain range) and are in the process of developing a master plan for the development of it. They are working with the county (it is unicorporated) on that plan.

“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Picture this: A group of landowners in your county comes to you. They have assembled concensus to unify planning for conservation and development of their parcels. Using ecological-based planning and market data, they have determined that their parcels should all be planned and developed as a single unit. Their thinking is that they can protect natural resources better and make more money by avoiding peicemeal development. Depending on where you are in the country, they may have assembled a few hundred acres or tens of thousands; size is determined by place-specific economic and ecological analysis.[/I]

First I would congratulate them for showing some environmental conscience rather than cashing in by selling the land to the highest bidder, which is usually some major homebuilder only concerned with building as many homes as possible.
This scenario would be such a dramatic shift from the current paradigm of real estate investment and development that its comical- but I'll suspend reality for a minute.

So now that we have this benevolent developer- how should government respond?
The PUD- some localities use a MPUD designation for larger developments- should ideally serve as the Master Plan for the community. In Florida, such a development could be reviewed as an areawide DRI. giff57 is right though; the PUD was envisioned for this type of scenario: to replace irrelevant zoning with a comprehensive planning tool. Often people unfamiliar with the local planning process view the PUD as simply an extension of the zoning process. In reality the PUD is often used because zoning regulations make little sense when applied to larger tasks such as planning a large-scale community. The PUD offers developers a free-market oriented tool to entitle land and this is why it has been so popular in recent years. That said, there are a lot of problems with PUDs that I'll save for another thread.